Mobile workstations are an exemplary study of engineering. They stuff the latest technology and mounds of features into a chassis not much larger than your “lowly” consumer PC. Often the chassis themselves are designed with more robust materials, great heat dissipation capacity, and of course room for the plethora of ports and expansion cards you’ll usually find in a workstation. HP, Dell, and Lenovo are the biggest players in the mobile workstation market and all are extremely competitive in both the 15-inch and 17-inch form factors.

Dell’s Precision M4600 is a stout contender, with its mil-spec resistance to the elements and aluminum-magnesium alloy chassis. Of course you have the latest Intel Sandy Bridge platform, with Core i5 processors coming standard. A standout spec that you won’t find in consumer notebooks is the inclusion of four DIMM slots, compared to the two one usually gets. This allows for a maximum of 32GB of DDR3 RAM, if you were to spring for the pricey 8GB modules that are now available.

Of course it wouldn’t be a true mobile workstation without some serious graphics horsepower, which is there AMD and NVIDIA come to the rescue. While an AMD FirePro M5950 Mobility Pro 1GB card is standard, right now Dell is offering a free upgrade to NVIDIA’s Quadro 1000M graphics card. Graphics drivers are of course ISV certified, for ultimate reliability and ensuring your rendering software doesn’t crash on hour 3 of 5 in a major render project. Dell also sees fit to offer a premium IPS display, with 100% Adobe color gamut support and 1080p resolution.

Perhaps the final cherry on top of this complicated beast is the standard 3 year onsite warranty Dell includes with all M4600 models. You can snag one with a Core i5 and the free NVIDIA upgrade starting at just $1199 or a well equipped Core i7 model rings up at $1999. These may seem like big numbers, but these machines would put most consumer notebooks to shame and effortlessly power through heavy workloads for years to come.